Maria was a textile designer in Austriain the early part of the 20th century. There is not a whole lot of info on her out there, but I love her use of line and color.
We looked at the images below and the kids identified the flowers, leaves, and stems, as well as the geometric shapes in the images.
We then talked about how some of the shapes were over other shapes and how some shapes were under other ones. Earlier in the year, we did a whale drawing that focused on above/below relationships, so this is a similar concept for the kinders.
We started by drawing background shapes on the big paper. I told students to press hard with their color sticks, so the color would look bold.
We then colored our larger leaves. We pressed hard on one side and left the other alone (or some colored both sides and we made sure that one side looked darker than the other). By doing this the leaves looked like they had a fold, so one part is getting more sun than the other.
When we colored the flowers, I talked about how the circle was from the front and the cone shape was from the side, so they looked different than each other. We pressed softly on one part of the side view flower to make it look a little more 3d.
We then cut out all the shapes and glued them in an arrangement we liked. So, even though we follwed the same steps, color usage was different as well as cut paper placement.